Instructions for a Heatwave (16 page)

So much happier since his retirement. Michael Francis lets out a bark of laughter but he hasn’t taken into account the extreme smallness of the room because the sound hits the wall in front of him and bounces back to slap him in the face.

“All I’m saying,” his mother shouts from the kitchen.

Robert had not been happier since his retirement; if you ask Michael Francis, he’d been engulfed with pointlessness. If you ask Michael Francis, Robert’s retirement is the worst thing that has ever happened to him. His job had provided an unswervable routine for his life, a reason to rise from bed in the morning, a place to spend the day, tasks to fill his time, and then a place from which to return in the evening. Without it, he is like a boat untethered from its dock, drifting and bumping aimlessly about.

He has no real sense of how his father has been spending his days since he left the bank. A typical conversation between them lately might go like this:

“Hello, Dad, how are you?”

“Well. How are you?”

“What have you been up to?”

“Not much. Yourself?”

Michael Francis suspects that Robert has been reduced to trailing about in Gretta’s wake, which, on reflection, his father probably doesn’t mind too much. Robert has always adored Gretta,
always deferred to her judgments, her whims (of which there are many), her wishes, much more so than Michael Francis’s friends’ fathers, who tend to take the more patriarchal line. He recalls, when they were children, his father being utterly focused on his mother. If she left the house, which she often did, being of a restless and sociable nature, to visit neighbors or to go to Mass or to collar the priest for a chat or just for a jaunt to the shops for a pint of milk, his father would pace the front room, saying, Where’s your mother, where’s she gone, did she say when she’d be back? His anxiety would transfer itself, like a virus, to Monica, who took to standing in the bay window, her hands clasped, watching for Gretta, who would always come back, often with her apron still on, rolling up the street and through the door, humming to herself and saying, What’s everybody standing about for—are you all waiting for a bus?

As a child he often wondered how his father managed at work, without Gretta to speak for him, to make decisions for him, to rally him along. It was unimaginable, his father spending all those hours without the enlivening force of his mother. He must have been about nine or so when he slipped out of school one lunchtime and, without really deciding to go there, went to the bank where his father worked. He knew where it was because Gretta had taken them there in the summer holidays, for a visit. He and Monica had been allowed to see the vault where people’s money was kept, to twirl around and around on a chair, to see the button under the counter that the tellers could press if a robber came. His father worked in a bank. He was the assistant manager. Michael Francis knew this. But he’d still been surprised by people queuing to speak to the people at the counter, by the secretaries clacking away on their typewriters, by the desk with his father’s name on it.

So he went there himself, walking along Holloway Road. It was after Aoife had been born, so he must have been nine or
ten. He went in through the bank doors, walked between the looped velvet ropes until he found the row of red chairs that he remembered from the summer and sat himself down on one. And when his father’s door opened and his father said, “Come in,” in he went. He sat down on the chair opposite his father’s and he was tempted to swizzle around and around in it again, like he had last summer, but he couldn’t because his father hadn’t said, What in God’s name are you doing here, which was what he’d expected him to say. His father hadn’t said anything at all. He was reading something in a file, which he snapped shut so fast it made Michael Francis jump. “Let’s see now,” his father said, and crossed over to a filing cabinet and wrenched open a drawer. Michael Francis could hear his own heart going
dub-a-dub, dub-a-dub
, his father’s back so close to him, his eyes directed down into the depths of the drawer, which contained sheaves and sheaves of paper. He hardly dared breathe and he tried to grab at the sensations to file them away to consider later: the delicious cold of the chair arms, the pencils with impeccable pink erasers at their tips, the proximity of his father, bent in concentration next to him.

Then his father turned and reared back, dropping the file to the floor, and he said, “It’s
you
,” and his voice was thin with shock—Michael Francis has never forgotten the sound of those two words—and then suddenly it was all over and Michael Francis was being marched back to school by a secretary. When he got home that afternoon his Meccano was up in a high cupboard and wasn’t coming down for a week.

He brushes the tips of the badger bristles against his own chin, watching himself in the sliver of mirror. His father minus his mother is an unsolvable equation. His silence is leavened by her loquaciousness, his order and impassivity the counterpoint to her chaos and drama. Robert unanimated by Gretta is something none of them has ever seen. Michael Francis has never been able
to picture his father in the years before he found Gretta. How had he survived? How had he conducted his life without her? Michael Francis knows precisely three things about his father from that strange hinter-life before his marriage: that he was born in Ireland, that he had a brother who died, that during the war he was there when the British Army got stranded at Dunkirk. That is all. The latter Michael Francis discovered one night while doing his homework at the kitchen table, his textbooks open before him, his hand moving his pen across the page, when an arm shot suddenly over his shoulder and flicked his textbook shut. Don’t let your father see that, his mother had said, darting a look over her shoulder at the door. He’d taken the book to his bedroom and looked at photographs of fishermen hauling soldiers out of the sea and into their boats, at the map showing the positions of the different troops, and how the Allies were surrounded, pushed back towards the water. He thought about what his mother had told him, that his father had been among the last men to be evacuated and that he’d thought he wouldn’t make it, that he’d be left behind, the sea in front of him, the enemy behind him. Michael Francis thought about this story and then, because he was seventeen and about to sit his exams and after that go to university, he shut the book and didn’t think about it again for a long while.

·  ·  ·

From her hiding place in the house, Monica sees Peter bending to pick up the cat’s body. The vet had wrapped it in a blanket, which was a considerate thing to do, Monica thought. No need for the children to see the—she has to force the word into her mind
—wound
. Peter has arranged it so that just the cat’s face shows. Jenny is ushering the girls forward now. They cling to her dress, to her arms, to her hands. How strange it must feel to be attached like that, lassoed like that, by two small people, like Gulliver and the Lilliputians (how Aoife had loved that story).
Florence is throwing back her head and roaring, her face shiny and scarlet. Jenny is hugging her body to her and Monica sees that she is crying, too; she reaches forward her hand and strokes the cat’s head, the pathway between its ears, where almost invisible stripes gather and seem to flow through the narrow gap. Monica finds that her fingers twitch involuntarily into the position she might use to do the same. She would like to feel that soft nap one last time. But, of course, she cannot. She cannot go down there. She squeezes the fingers in her opposite hand.

Peter had refused to say that he had put the cat down; he had refused to do that small thing for her. She had lain next to him in bed and pleaded and pleaded for him not to tell the girls that it had been her. But he’d said no, his back to her in the dark. He couldn’t lie to them. It was out of the question.

Jessica hangs back, Monica notices, sobbing into her palms. Peter lowers the bundle—a pathetic-looking thing it is, like an armful of old rags—into the hole. He turns and embraces the children, too, and the four of them are bound together on the lawn, a complicated knot of people.

Monica can’t watch any more. She can’t. She’ll find something to do, something useful, set herself a task, put herself to work. She should make a list of people to ring about her father, people to ask, places to search. She doesn’t believe this disappearance stuff, not for a minute. Something must have happened. Her father wouldn’t just walk out on them, on her. He would never do such a thing, not in a million years.

She won’t go downstairs, she won’t. She doesn’t want to see the girls, doesn’t want to feel the force of their anger. And she doesn’t want any questions about her father from Jenny. She heard Peter telling her earlier. The cheek of it. She’ll have words with him about that later. How dare he share details of her life, her private family life, with that woman? She’ll stay out of the way. There’s lots to do up here. Jenny won’t come into the house anyway, Monica is sure. Why would she?

But, astonishingly, she does. Monica hears her voice spiraling up from the hallway, speaking to one of the children in soothing tones, asking them to please leave their sandals on. Monica stands there at the top of the stairs, frozen, one hand on the banister, unable to comprehend what is happening.

Jenny. In the house. For the first time since she left it. Peter had never told her this might happen.

She can hear her in the kitchen now. Opening and shutting a cupboard door. Because, of course, she will know where everything is kept, where everything is. Someone is running the tap. There is a clink of cups, a murmur of voices, still soothing, the noise of a child still crying. Jessica, is it, or Florence? She’s heard that a mother can recognize her child’s cry instantly; the same is obviously not true for stepmothers.

She’s in the house
.

Monica feels moisture express itself through every pore in her body. It’s so goddamn hot up here, her blouse tight and wet under her arms. Her joints seem to ache with stillness but she’s unable to move, unable to retreat back into the bedroom and unable to go down the stairs.

·  ·  ·

When Michael Francis returns, everyone has disappeared. The sight of an empty table, discarded teacups, a folded napkin greets him. He hears a footfall in the room above, unmistakably his mother’s, that emphatic, lurching tread. The back door is open so he moves towards it and gets a view of Aoife from behind, on the back step, knees drawn up, a line of smoke rising straight up, like a signal, undisturbed by any movement of air.

He lowers himself to sit beside her. She doesn’t say anything but moves the hand with the cigarette towards him. He shakes his head and she turns to look at him, one eyebrow raised.

“Given up,” he says.

She raises both her eyebrows.

“Mostly.” He plucks the cigarette from her fingers and takes a drag. “Don’t tell Claire.”

She makes a small, scornful noise that means, As if I would, and he feels a rush of how much he’s missed her and how much he loves that she’s the one person in his family who will always keep a secret, who will be true to her word, and how much of a relief it is to have her here, and he is about to say his wife’s name, he is about to say, Claire, about to tell Aoife everything because he knows she would listen until he ran out of words, and then she’d ask a question that would provide him with more words and she’d stay silent until the end, her head on one side, and then she’d say something, something so—

“Is Monica coming?” Aoife asks.

He hands the cigarette back to her, and as she takes it he notices that her nails are bitten down to the quick and he’s puzzled because he didn’t know she bit her nails—wasn’t that Monica?

“Later today, I think.” He looks across at her. “She’s got a lot on.”

Aoife smiles, like he’d known she would.

“Something about burying a cat,” he says.

“Monica has a cat?”

“Had. Peter’s, I think.”

“Oh.” She tucks her feet underneath her, rests her chin on her knees. “Look at this place,” she murmurs.

He surveys the back garden, a narrow block of land, fitted in between its neighbors, the faded, balding grass, the dried, bloomless flowers, the etiolated plum tree.

“I know.”

“I mean, I’d heard the drought was bad but I didn’t realize it was this bad.” She grinds her cigarette into the step. “It’s so
hot
. And it’s only … what time is it?”

He turns his watch towards him. “Eight-fifteen.”

“Eight-fifteen,” she repeats, looking up into the lapis sky. “Christ.”

They sit for a while longer. A bee drones by, scribbling on the air near their heads before changing direction for the branches of the apple tree.

“So, what’s your view?” She nods towards the house.

He draws a breath. The bee returns to them, then seems to change its mind, heading upwards along the brickwork of the house. “I don’t know,” he says. “I really don’t know.”

“It’s not good.”

“Not at all.”

“Do you think he’s …?”

“What?”

“You know.”

Their eyes meet for a moment, then veer away.

“Done away with himself? Is that what you think?”

“I don’t know.” Aoife fiddles with a silver chain around her wrist, letting the links fall through her fingers. “I don’t know what I think. I never know what I think about him. He’s an impossible person to …”

“Fathom.”

“Exactly. Do you think he’s gone off with someone?”

“A fancy woman?” he says, employing a favorite expression of their mother’s. “I don’t think so.”

“Sure?”

“I don’t see him doing that.”

“Who’d have him?” Aoife murmurs, opening her pack of cigarettes, then closing it again. “Do you think she knows more than she’s letting on?”

He turns to look at her. “What makes you say that?”

She shrugs. “You know what she’s like.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know.” She shrugs again. “Sees what she wants to and—”

“Filters out the rest. Give us one of those,” he says, and she hands him the pack. He puts a cigarette to his lips and is about to take the matches when they are interrupted by a shout from above their heads.